An interest and belief-based model of explicit communication

The paper outlines an inferential model of explicit communication. The first section presents the main notions involved in the model, that is, the speaker’s intended meaning and addressee’s intended meaning. The first notion is centred on the speaker’s interest in situation: a speaker intends the meaning of an utterance on the basis of a partial order of preferences with respect to a set of contextually plausible meanings. The second notion is centred on the addressee’s communicative inference, which is based on the addressee’s belief about the speaker’s interest and on the linguistic form of a sentence. In the following sections, the paper presents the phenomenon of semantic underdeterminacy, introduces the preferences partial order, and the communicative inferences. The paper takes the notion of interest from cognitive social theory, the notion of meaning from semantics, the notion of explicit meaning from pragmatics, and uses the notion of communicative inference for explicit meaning in partial accordance with Relevant Theory. Finally, the paper discusses some examples taken from the pragmatist literature.